Government Info Compromised

Wednesday, December 5, 2012 @ 04:12 PM gHale

By Richard Sale
Secret information on counter-terrorism shared by foreign governments looks as though it suffered a compromise by a massive data theft by a senior IT technician for the NDB, Switzerland’s intelligence service, said a source within the CIA.

Intelligence agencies in the United States and Britain are among those warned by Swiss authorities their data could be in jeopardy, the source said.

Swiss authorities arrested the technician suspected in the data theft last summer amid signs he was acting suspiciously, but he was later released while a criminal investigation by the office of Switzerland’s Federal Attorney General continued. The suspect’s name was not made public.

Swiss authorities said he intended to sell the stolen data to foreign officials or commercial buyers, the source said.

Investigators are piecing together a timeline on what happened and believe the suspect became disgruntled because he felt he was being ignored and his advice on operating the data systems was not being taken seriously, the CIA source said.

As a result, the technician downloaded terabytes of information, running into hundreds of thousands or even millions of printed pages of classified material from the Swiss intelligence service’s servers onto portable hard drives.

He then carried them out of government buildings in a backpack.Richard Sale was United Press International’s Intelligence Correspondent for 10 years and the Middle East Times, a publication of UPI. He is the author of Clinton’s Secret Wars and Traitors.